This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Certain abbreviations that may be found in the description and/or in the Figures are herewith defined as follows:
AES advanced encryption standard
AMI amazon machine image
API application programming interface
AWS application web service
DB database
DC domain controller
EBS elastic block store
ELB elastic load balancer
EMR elastic map reduce
FIDS federal information processing standards
ID identification
HSM hardware security module
KM key management
KMS key management service
RDS rational database service
SDK software development kit
SSL secure sockets layer
Cloud computing is an approach to sharing computing resources over the Internet. One area of cloud computing includes a host provider (for example, cloud provider) providing virtual server instances on which user devices can run applications. Examples of applications available in such a cloud environment can include social media applications, and applications provided by Yahoo®, EBay®, and Amazon® to name only a few. As these applications are run in a cloud separate from a user device and its application service provider special attention needs to be given to application data security. In this regard at least a problem exists in that application data security may not be trusted to be provided by the cloud provider.